Merci, mesdames et messieurs.
I looked at that list also, and I came to the conclusion that I would try to answer one or two of the questions. I very much agree with what Bessma has been saying. She and I have worked together on many things for a long time. Maybe we've come to see the world too much the same, but anyway, we do.
I'll speak a little bit about Trump's foreign policy. As Bessma was saying, the “u” words—unpredictable, uncertain—seem to be operative. The best description of Trump's foreign policy I've seen was a cartoon in the Washington Post yesterday. It shows Trump with a civil war kind of cannon, and he's blowing a big hole in the Oval Office wall. He says to his assistant, Reince Priebus, “Okay now draw a target around that.” Then the second line is, “And ask Spicey to distribute it to the newspapers.”
This is a government that doesn't have a foreign policy. It has erratic impulses, and that's making people nervous literally around the world.
I want to talk I guess more specifically about the U.S. proposed budget, the cuts, and what that might entail. There is to be a cut of about $10 billion from the State Department—about 28% of its budget—that will fall particularly heavily on the United Nations and other organizations. There is always a lot of loose talk about what the size of the U.S. budget is and how much is being spent. The budget of the UN is about $13 billion to $14 billion, give or take, and the U.S. share of that is about a quarter. If you take out a quarter of the spending of the U.S., you're looking at about a $4-billion hole that others will have to find some way either of filling or of cutting programs that are not going to be necessary. The Canadian share of the UN budget is about 3%.
There's always a lot of misunderstanding in people's minds about the size of the aid program. There was a poll recently I saw that suggested that Americans thought about a third of their budget was going to foreign aid, when it's about 1%. Indeed, the Canadian share is heading in that direction also. There's going to need to be some catching up.
I looked through this in the late 1990s when the Americans also decided to stop paying their full dues. They ran up a rather significant bill, but at the end of the day, they decided they would pay the bill, and the UN was financially mostly restored.
There was talk at the time of reducing the U.S. share of the UN budget to about 15%. That wasn't talk that was originating in Washington. That was talk that was originating around the table in the UN because people wanted to reduce the influence of the Americans in the UN. It's one of the great ironies that no one benefits more from the UN than the United States does, and no one seems to disregard it more.
I'll say a word or two about why the UN matters and why we should not be giving up on it. First of all, the UN Charter provides the international rules of the road, and most countries accept most of it most of the time. It's in their interest. It's the only rule book there is for the international strategic political situation.
Secondly, there is a kind of non-stop diplomacy that takes place here 24-7. This is something that's not well understood. There hasn't been a war between the major powers since Korea, and even that could be considered an exception because China was not in the UN or not on the Security Council.
There hasn't been a war between powers on the Security Council since 1945. Part of the reason is that they are there day in and day out at the UN Security Council. The five permanent members run the place—no one should have any doubt about that—and they're meeting constantly, day in, day out, often weekends. I'm the last Canadian to have sat on the UN Security Council, and the stories you hear about nobody being home on the weekend and nobody being there after 5:00 are urban legend. I can remember meeting all night plenty of times and getting phone calls in the middle of the night to come for a meeting plenty of times.
There is a non-stop diplomacy, and that means that the Russians and the Americans and the Chinese know each others' red lines, know what the limits are, and are not going to go to war by miscalculation or misunderstanding.
A third value of the UN Security Council is that it has basically stigmatized aggression. Why was it that the Russians were pretending they were little green men in Crimea? They didn't want to admit that they were actually breaking international law. It's one of the great, delicious ironies in the Syrian situation that the Russians have run to the Security Council to complain that the Americans are breaking international law, and isn't that a terrible thing to be doing?
Well, it is in some ways a very regrettable thing to be doing, but it's also a very understandable one. If the law prevents you from saving people who are being gassed and bombarded by their own government, then the law is an ass and something has to be done about it, and that's what we've been seeing. That was the hope, at least, with Trump.
Always with Trump, however, there's more to it than that—or less to it than that—and in this particular case it is possible that if the Americans don't follow up, they will actually have made the situation worse in Syria rather than better, because people now have expectations. For ordinary Syrians who thought perhaps relief was coming, it probably isn't.
There are things that could be done. Bessma and I have talked about them at various times. At every stage of this crisis it has been easier to do something about it the day before than it is the day afterwards. That goes also for no-fly zones and for safe havens. The Turkish government, for example, has been advocating from the very beginning for a place inside Syria—and it has more than one motivation for this—where Syrians could go and be safe and not have to test their luck in the Mediterranean.
That's my time, Mr. Chairman.